Hasta La Gadget!

DIY projects are all about sweat, tears and learning from mistakes. Just ask a group of electronics hobbyists that recently launched a $25 balloon bought off eBay with a payload carrying an Android G1 phone, two cameras and other assorted electronics up to nearly 70,000 feet in the air.

“Fundamentally, we are all space enthusiasts,” says Mikolaj Habryn, one of the participants.”We wanted to see if you can get a balloon up to high altitudes that can be ultimately used for ideas such as mounting a telescope or measuring radiation levels.”

The team successfully launched the balloon and gathered some great photographs but also made some fatal mistakes in their planning.

The entire project conceived and launched in just about a week comes from members of Noisebridge, a collectively operated hacker space in San Francisco.

In just a week, the group bought the equipment and built a balloon. The balloon itself is a military surplus weather balloon that weighs about 5 pounds and when inflated can lift 15 pounds to 20 pounds.

For the payload, the team put two cameras that were tweaked for time-lapse photography. The cameras were programmed to take snapshots every 30 seconds.

“Because we were worried about temperature problems, we put it inside an insulated cooler,” says Habryn.

They also included a ham radio with a position beacon and a GPS that that could work at high altitudes.

With some help from his colleagues at Google, Habryn programmed the T-Mobile phone to send its GPS co-ordinates through text messaging whenever in range of a cellular network.

“We had some custom software that would also record all the data from the phone’s sensors … such as the accelerometers and GPS and save it to the phone’s internal memory,” says Habryn.

The Klipsch Image S4 earbuds won an Editors’ Choice award last year. We’re giving away a pair to one lucky winner in this week’s Crave giveaway.

This news nugget will have you smacking your forehead and crying “Why didn’t I think of that!?” Sagem and Telefónica have taken a regular old cellphone SIM card, and stuffed a Wi-Fi radio inside. Even the name is obvious: SIMFi.

It works like this: You pop the card into a cellphone, and “SIM toolkit applets”, essentially control software on the card itself, take care of settings and broadcast. The radio inside creates a hotspot to share your 3G HSPA connection via Wi-Fi. It is ingenious.

With the huge Telefónica as part of the partnership, you can expect a big push. And because this will work on almost any phone, and replaces something you have to have anyway – a SIM – there’s no reason that this shouldn’t be in every cellphone in the next couple of years. The SIMFi will be launched at next week’s MWC trade-show in Barcelona, Spain, where we should find out dates and pricing.

Sagem Orga and Telefonica turn the SIM card into a Wi-Fi hotspot [Sagem]

Photo: kalleboo/Flickr

Joby has expanded its line of plucky, bendy tripods to include one for the iPod Touch. The product can be bought either as a kit with a case and a three-legged stand or – if you already own a Gorillapod – just the case, which hugs the iPod touch snugly in soft-touch plastic with cutouts for the dock connector, the home button and the volume rocker.

The best thing about the Gorillapod is that it is so easy to carry. Throw the flexible, pole-gripping ‘pod into a bag and it takes up almost no room, bending to fit the space like a spare pair of socks. I took a small one away last weekend and foiled my father’s lame attempt to stay out of a family photo by whipping the little tripod out and quickly setting up my Panasonic GF1, while my dad was still huffing and pretending he couldn’t find the self timer on my mother’s camera.

The iPod Touch version isn’t for taking photos of course, but it’ll prop the iPod up nicely for watching movies. And if you buy the kit, you get all the tripod screw and sticky-pad accessories to use with your camera. Better still, at $35 it’s only $5 more than the basic version. $35, or $20 for the case on its own.

Gorillapod for iPod Touch [Joby. Thanks, Mark!]

See Also:

• Gorillapod Go-Go: Miniature, Flexible Tripod
• Hands-On With the Joby Gorilla Mobile
• Joby Announces 'New' Gorillamobile Cellphone Tripod

HP’s mobile computing unit appears to have decided that the term smartbook refers to putting a smartphone’s components inside a netbook’s body — which kind of makes sense — so they’ve built their Airlife 100 atop an Android OS platform, underpinned by a Snapdragon CPU (unconfirmed, but highly likely), a 16GB SSD, 3G and WiFi connectivity, and a 10.1-inch touchscreen display. We really can find no cause for complaint — in fact this is the most excitement a Compaq-branded product has caused us… ever. HP touts a rock solid 12-hour battery life for the Airlife, which stretches out to a mighty 10 days of standby, in case you’re one of those folks who hate to switch their electronics off. Announced in partnership with Telefonica, this smartbook will be offered as a subsidized part of mobile broadband service plans in Europe and Latin America. It may well find itself renamed under the HP Mini branding when it rolls around to the US, but for now head on over to Engadget Spanish for the full PR.

Compaq Airlife 100 puts Android OS, Snapdragon CPU, and an SSD behind 10.1-inch touchscreen originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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